Stop wedding dieting

Last week I met a friend (and bride-to-be) for coffee. Of course, the first question out of my mouth was “how’s the wedding planning?” What I wasn’t expecting was my bride to break down into tears at the question. I know wedding planning can be stressful, what with the overwhelming logistics and trying to manage other people’s feelings, but none of those common triggers were her problem.

“I just don’t know what to do about my weight!” I have to admit my jaw dropped. I didn’t even know how to comfort her because I didn’t see that “issue” coming from a mile away. As it turned out, after buying her dress, the bride began crash dieting. She lost so much weight that at her next fitting, the dress needed major reconstruction. And the wedding is only three weeks out.

For reasons far more complicated than “we want to look pretty,” brides are pressured into insecurities about their weight and body size. Wedding planning only exacerbates the social stigma that all brides need (and want) to lose weight before their wedding. Gyms offer wedding boot camps, special “cleanse” diets offer discounts and in a particularly irritating new trend, wedding expos give away gym memberships as door prizes.

What I told my bride at the coffeehouse, and what I want all of you to know, is there are certain truths that you need to remember about wedding diets.

Crash dieting and excessive exercise cause more harm than good. Okay, before we begin, understand that I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat healthy nor that exercise is bad. I’m talking about the extremists and the fad diets. Crash dieting has serious health risks and excessive exercise can cause some serious body ailments. Do you really want to risk not being able to dance because you broke or leg or having to use up all your sick time in the hospital for exhaustion and low blood sugar? “Looking good” on your wedding day is never worth not making it to your wedding day.

You should be buying a dress that fits you now. And then work on a moderate (and health-focused) diet/exercise plan. Brides need to stop buying gowns in a size too small with the objective of losing weight to fit in it. This logic is problematic in many ways. First, it encourages and motivates women to utilize the extreme and unhealthy crash diets and exercise plans I talked about above. Second, your body and weight loss is too unpredictable for the plan to work. What if you lose all the weight in your waist but don’t lose an inch in your hips? Not to mention all the other what-ifs: lose too much weight, don’t lose any at all, etc. Trust me, you’re better off buying the dress that works with your body now, and make a plan for you to stay fit and healthy. You wouldn’t go trying a new hair treatment that could make you go bald right before your wedding, right? So why would you play a game of Craps with your body.

Diet programs, gyms and wedding boot camps are out to make money. I’m not saying that the owners/CEOs of these businesses didn’t start their business with good intentions. I’m not even saying they don’t still have good intentions. But bottom line is they are for-profit companies who want and need to make money. This means they are going to use every marketing tool in their toolbox, even if it means preying on insecurities and unfair and arbitrary social paradigms that hurt women. These places know that brides worry about how they look and they know the trend is for brides to diet and exercise before their wedding day. These businesses use this knowledge and statistics to target their marketing directly to you. Understand that they want to sell to you, even if you don’t need it.

Last, but most important: Every bride looks beautiful, regardless of her hair, make-up, dress, body type, skin tone or any other arbitrary determination of beauty. What makes you radiant on your wedding day is the happiness emanating from your love for your partner and the time you are sharing with your friends and family. Seriously, everything else is gravy. You couldn’t not look beautiful (especially to the only person whose opinion you should care about — your partner) if you tried. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: the day you said you “will” is more important than the day you say “I do.” Think about it for a minute. When you said yes (or you popped the question), you were already in that moment saying I want you for better or worse. And your appearance, is never your worst for your partner.

The best and most absolute way to combat the dangerous diet/exercise practices is to stop the root of insecurity. We need to stop thinking our outer appearance has any value on our beauty. Or, even better, stop putting so much value in “beauty” (a completely subjective interpretation) at all. To steal a line from a recent Verizon commercial, “isn’t it time we told [girls] [they are] pretty brilliant, too?”

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